experimentation

Self-experimentation

Self-experimentation refers to the very special case of single-subject scientific experimentation in which the experimenter conducts the experiment on her- or himself. Usually this means that the designer, operator, subject, analyst, and user or reporter of the experiment are all the same. It is a special case of single-subject research.

History

Human scientific self-experimentation principally (though not necessarily) falls into the fields of medicine and psychology, broadly conceived. Self-experimentation has a long and well-documented history in medicine which continues to the present. In psychology, the best known self-experiments are the memory studies of Hermann Ebbinghaus, establishing many basic characteristics of human memory through tedious experiments involving nonsense syllables.

Recently, Dr. Seth Roberts and Dr. Allen Neuringer have advocated the broader use of self-experimentation, arguing that its low-cost and ease (compared to traditional large-sample experiments with human subjects) facilitate conducting a very large number of experiments, testing many treatments and measuring many things at once. This allows considerable trial and error and can lead to the generation and testing of many ideas. Self-experimentation provides superior evidence to mere anecdotal evidence, because the entire experimental is explicitly designed to test a hypothesis, but is subject to observer bias. Self-experimentation could be considered a useful adjunct to large-sample experiments in scientific research.

Psychology

The self-experimental approach has long and often been applied to practical psychological problems. Benjamin Franklin recorded his self-experiment of successively devoting his attention for a week to one of thirteen "Virtues", "leaving the other Virtues to their ordinary Chance, only marking every Evening the Faults of the Day." In Self-change: Strategies for solving personal problems, M. J. Mahoney suggested that self-experimentation be used as a method of psychological treatment. He recommended that clients be taught basic scientific methods, in order that the client become a "personal scientist." And with achieving an experiment, he/she may continue to do so with pride.

Chemistry

Until recently, it was common practice among synthetic chemists to taste newly prepared compounds. The purpose was to provide an additional characteristic for identification, taking advantage of the selective chemical receptors that form this sense. However, as one might guess, this practice also led to numerous fatalities and near-fatalities. Surprisingly, it was not recognition of the risk of this self-experimentation that led to its extinction, but rather the advent of instrumentation capable of exacting physical characterization of compounds (particularly spectrometers with infrared, ultraviolet, NMR and mass selectivity). The routine tasting of new compounds by chemists of bygone times is, in fact, the main source of knowledge of the human toxicity for certain chemicals.

This practice had positive and negative aspects. It probably contributed to the death of Carl Wilhelm Scheele from apparent mercury poisoning. Joseph Priestley discovered soda water while experimenting with carbon dioxide and tasting the results. Dr. Albert Hofmann discovered the psychedelic properties of LSD by accidentally absorbing it—and later intentionally ingesting it—in a self-experiment.

Other

In 1998 a British scientist, Kevin Warwick, became the first human to test an RFID as an implant to control surrounding technology. In 2002 he went on to have an array of 100 electrodes fired into the median nerve of his left arm during a 2-hour neurosurgical operation. With this implant in place, over a 3-month period, he conducted a number of experiments including the first direct electronic communication between the nervous systems of two humans.

Examples in older fiction include the tales of The Invisible Man and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In each case the scientist's unorthodox theories lead to permanent change and ultimately to self-destruction.